Speaking of cross country refurbs not exactly matching, when will Orlando get the new 3rd lift effects from Disneylands BTM?
Oh.
And when will DL get it's HM stretch room's repaired (wallpaper peeling for like two years now) and get the new audio system on par with WDW's or get our Singing Busts?
Oh.
Oh, I definitely agree - although my biggest objection on Mermaid is the load/unload area. If you look up you can see the theming stop a lot more suddenly then the ceiling on the ride. Having said that, a black tarp would solve the visible steel problems in Everest. They've gotta have a leftover Yeti tarp they can use...
I've been clamoring for them to put up some duvetyne beneath the track in Everest since 2006. Still hasn't happened, people would much rather complain about intentionally plasticized art direction.
It's not just that you can see load and unload from inside the ride, it's that load and unload can see each other.
Adventure through Inner Space/Haunted Mansion/Journey into the Imagination; had load and unload in separate rooms that hid themselves from each other.
Somewhere along the line we lost this piece of wisdom. It's not like it's hard to design for this or anything, but the Buzz Lightyear/Mermaid rides now just have this Chaplin in Modern Times feel of herding people on and off an industrial belt.
There are a lot of design flaws in Mermaid. The last half of the ride has scene transitions that are very obviously walls without any attempt to have them even make any architectural sense. It's like the anti-immersive.
This is an annoying trend that has happened cross-industry on all rides and one that I'm not thrilled about. (TSMM, Cars, Everest, Mine Train, LM, Forbidden Journey, Transformers, The Mummy more or less, Mystic Manor(I think)). In fact the only modern ride I can think of without this going on is Antarctica and it could've benefited from the extra space. Having separate loading and unloading just gives so much more of a sense of travel. That'd you've actually gone on a journey.
I think that's the main reasoning. Saving space. In fact, questionable art direction aside, nearly all the issues Mermaid have seem to stem from trying to build it in a footprint that was really too small. (In California that is. The florida version has a whole additional corner added to the building that could have been used for more show but was instead devoted to employee areas - even though the building was designed with those areas on the second floor for the California version. That's the same kind of logic that resulted in who knows how much extra money being spent making Soarin' at Epcot earthquake proof.)
While having separate load and unload areas is better for show, the benefit isn't drastic and the large amount of space that is saved undoubtedly contributed to the decision being made for the the CA version of the ride. The abbreviated ending scenes seem to stem from the same motives. In other words, I don't think the scenes were shoved together to save on the budget (no more than do I think the art direction and lighting had anything to do with the budget), but more to get them to fit into the space at all. Surely there was a way to reconfigure the track to accomplish the same goals, without the abbreviated ending scenes but it is what it is. The load/unload issue doesn't kill me one way or the other and if the upgrades to the end come eventually then we'll be much better off. The whole of LM just seems to be a lot of seemingly well-intentioned decisions combining in less than stellar ways.
And to whomever was giving Cat in the Hat a pass on quality 'cause its Universal...the super critics here that continually claim IOA and Universal are sooooo much better than Disney, they care sooooo much more about attention to detail and quality, and never skimp on anything - you can't set different standards for the two. Either the cat in the hat is acceptable show quality (which makes LM acceptable as well) or it isn't (which acknowledges that Universal isn't God and that the LM is somewhat lacking).
